News Desk: Miyamoto Discusses Plans for Wii U’s NFC Functionality

Nintendo looking at ways to take advantage of underutilized Wii U GamePad tech.

By Andy Hoover. Posted 03/06/2013 20:00 Comment on this     ShareThis

With Wii U’s many features, it can be easy to looe track of just everything the system can do. However, Shigeru Miyamoto has confirmed that Nintendo is well aware that the Wii U GamePad included Near Field Communication and the company is currently working on ideas on how to best utilize it.

“With NFC, that’s a feature that everyone that owns a Wii U can take advantage of. So that’s what we’re putting our priorities right now,” said Miyamoto. “We’re hoping that in the near future we’ll be able to show you something that will take advantage of the NFC on Wii U and people will be able to enjoy that.”

For the less tech savvy out there, NFC is a wireless technology that allows devices to quickly and seamlessly share information by coming in close proximity with one another. On the GamePad, that would mean swiping a NFC capable object over the grey rectangle bellow the left analog stick. For example, Nintendo could technically create Pokémon cards with NFC chips built into them, thus allowing you to scan the cards into your Wii U so you could use your digital collection of cards to play online against other card collectors around the world. Of course, this does not reflect any confirmed plans on how Nintendo intends to use the technology, but if the company hasn’t thought of this yet then I highly encourage it to steal this idea and pay me a generous consultant’s fee.

Miyamoto also touched on the idea of incorporating two GamePads on one console and confirmed that Nintendo is currently working on concepts that utilize the ability, but it most likely won’t see implementation until there are more GamePads out in the hands of gamers so people can actually take advantage of it.

Source: Nintendo Life

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